<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>the keys of death and hades by corpsesoldier</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899231">the keys of death and hades</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/corpsesoldier/pseuds/corpsesoldier'>corpsesoldier</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Fic Jam 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Gen, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), The People's Tomb Fic Jam: First</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 22:48:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,392</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899231</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/corpsesoldier/pseuds/corpsesoldier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Augustine was the first and then he was the last.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Fic Jam 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1962700</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the keys of death and hades</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>the lyctors are awful and I love them</p><p>written for the discord jam prompt: "first"</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Augustine Quinque was the First Saint to serve the King Undying, and he watched his brother die.</p><p>It was good, before that. They pursued the highest scholarship in the presence of the greatest hearts and minds in the resurrected Nine Houses, and they worked at the behest of the Emperor their God. It had been good. Even his dislike of Mercymorn had not yet been sharpened to a cutting edge by ten thousand years. John even went as far as to say, once, that they worked well together.</p><p>He had no idea, of course.</p><p>The two of them were together that night, when it began. They were searching for their cavaliers. Augustine had always found their whispered conversations and furtive smiles childish, and more than once had told Alfred that Mercy’s wretched lapdog was bad news. Alfred just smiled indulgently, nodded as though he might take his brother’s advice to heart, and went on and did what he wanted anyway. </p><p>Augustine had valued that once, that Alfred would not let himself be bullied into anything he didn’t want to do. That he could not be led anywhere he did not want to go. The thought would keep him up at night for decades.</p><p>Alfred and Cristabel had bade their necromancers join them in one of the laboratories. Mercy’s lab. Augustine would cling to that fact like it was the edge of a canyon, fingernails digging into unforgiving rock. He would read in it an admission of guilt, of blame. </p><p>But that was later. That night, he and Mercy hauled open the heavy door in ignorance. The dead eye sockets of the carved animal skull watched them with apathy, as though it had seen its share of tragedy and could no longer muster up the energy even for pity. </p><p>Before they were fully inside, Augustine said, “All right, kid, what did you have to show us?”</p><p>And he stopped. Mercy stopped. He felt her body draw up tight beside him, going cool and brittle as untreated iron. He could perfectly imagine her expression, her thin judgemental mouth pressed thinner, bloodless, a narrow slash of disbelief and horror. But this imagining was all he had. He did not turn to look at her. He could not take his eyes from Alfred.</p><p>He and Cristabel stood at the center of the room. Their eyes were wide and shining so brilliantly they seemed to give off heat. They vibrated with barely contained energy, Cristabel smiling her broad idiot’s smile, Alfred’s lips curved in a kind of resigned contentment that submerged Augustine’s spine in ice water.</p><p>Both of them had a dagger to their throats.</p><p>“Al—” Augustine started, but Mercy’s shrill voice cut him off.</p><p>“Cristabel, put that horrid thing away. <i>What</i> do you think you’re <i>doing?</i>”</p><p>Cristabel responded in the breathless rush of the fanatic. “We figured it out. Your theorem. We understand what we’re to do. For God. For you.”</p><p>Cristabel had never figured out anything in all her life. Cristabel couldn’t figure out how to make porridge while staring at the instructions on the package. Cristabel certainly couldn’t have figured out their <i>immensely complicated necromantic megatheorem on the subject of immortality</i>. Augustine’s gaze slid back to Alfred. Quiet, dutiful Alfred, always peering over his shoulder, always seeing something with those practical cavalier’s eyes that Augustine had missed. Using his dry observations to set up a joke at his brother’s expense. But Augustine wasn’t laughing.</p><p>“Listen, chaps, whatever you think you’ve puzzled out, you’re wrong.” He sounded so reasonable. Maybe he could be reasonable enough for all of them. “The damned thing’s not finished. We keep getting rubbish results. The math is bad.”</p><p>“It has to be,” Mercy said, a little faintly.</p><p>Alfred really smiled at him then. A hint of mockery around the eyes. “Just because you don’t like the answer doesn’t mean it’s wrong, Gus.”</p><p>His vertebrae froze solid. “Don’t—” he said. Took one step. Reached out his hand.</p><p>It happened so fast. One second their cavaliers were standing there. The next, Alfred’s throat was a red, wet ruin and he was lying in Augustine’s arms. There was blood on Augustine’s face. Alfred’s teeth shone crimson. He was still fucking smiling. </p><p>He was dimly aware of Mercy and Cristabel, playing out their own mirrored tragedy. Cristabel had done a sloppy job. She gasped for breath, was pleading “Mercy—” and Augustine wondered which she was asking for. Alfred’s cut was neat and deep and the blood poured out of him like from an open tap. He couldn’t speak. He didn’t need to. One of his hands fisted in Augustine’s sleeve. Alfred’s eyes burned with divine purpose.</p><p>Augustine wasn’t a flesh magician. Neither was Mercy; not yet the obsessive anatomist she would come to be. Augustine was a spirit magician through and through, and there was nothing he could do but reach in and try to grab hold of Alfred’s soul.</p><p>Mercy was still sobbing over her dying cavalier when Alfred’s eyes dimmed. Augustine could taste his brother’s blood on his lips. He felt a furnace ignite deep in the dark pit of his soul and he screamed as he burned.</p><p>-</p><p>Augustine the First was the last of those original blessed eight, and he watched his sister die.</p><p>All of his beloved and despised siblings were dead. Anastasia first, that lucky son of a bitch. Then Cyrus and Ulysses and Cassiopeia. Poor mad Cytherea, for whom he and Mercy had moved too slowly. </p><p>They left Gideon in the River alone. Now something that was not Gideon walked around in his meat, black glass over eyes that Augustine knew would not be green. He’d known something was up ever since the little broken bone witch exploded Gideon’s chest cavity. Afterward, someone else had asked for a cigarette in Gideon’s voice. And now they were graced with the presence of one Pyrrha Dve, presumed dead. Something burned hot and terrible in Augustine’s gut at the thought.</p><p>So Gideon was dead, too. Augustine would have thought Gideon too stubborn to die, but he really should know better by now. </p><p>He hadn’t expected any of it to end like this. He had expected an end, and he’d expected it soon—inasmuch that anything can be soon for them, so used to working on timelimes of centuries. But he hadn’t banked on the reappearance of their failed Ninth House experiment, tucked safe in the back of Harrowhark’s chewed up brain. He hadn’t anticipated that dead cavalier looking back at him with A.L.’s eyes. He hadn’t predicted the sheer depth of the betrayal. Neither of them had. </p><p>How could they have? It was <i>John</i>, for God’s sake.</p><p>A black hole opened in Augustine’s chest when he watched Mercy render their Lord, their brother, their best friend into his component parts. He shuddered all the way down to the blinding, burning light inside him that was Alfred’s imprisoned soul. Nausea rested heavy in the back of his throat.</p><p>They'd had to. He had lied to them. He had lied.</p><p>
<i>We could have chosen to stop.</i>
</p><p>Cyth had been right all along. Damn her twice.</p><p>Augustine started to think he’d have the privilege of seeing her soon, now that it was finally over, and—John was just there again. Like a magic trick where Augustine had been watching the wrong hand. His nose ran from the acerbic punch of John’s necromancy against his sinuses.</p><p>And again, it happened so fast Augustine barely saw it. It always happened so fast. He’s never able to hold on to the moment it happens, the touch that knocks the vase from the table, the shift that tips the spinning plate off its axis. He’s never fast enough to actually do anything. The only thing he ever sees is the explosion, the shattered pieces, the crater of loss.</p><p>Joy was dead, and Augustine was the last. The last, save for Emperor John Gaius. </p><p>Augustine reached into the River. He felt the size and shape of the Mithraeum, weighed the energy required to do what must be done. He was a Lyctor. It was nothing.</p><p>He regretted the children, a little. But maybe it’s a kindness. Maybe it would have been better if they’d all been drowned at rebirth.</p><p>Augustine the First bared his teeth, and he raised the water, and he sent them all to hell.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>you can come say hi on tumblr <a href="https://corpsesoldier.tumblr.com">here!</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>